Baseten Raises $1.5 Billion at Up to $13 Billion Valuation, Targeting Lower-Cost AI Inference Market

Baseten is closing a $1.5 billion fundraising round structured in dual tiers — some investors entering at an $11 billion valuation, others at $13 billion — as demand grows for infrastructure supporting lower-cost AI deployment, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. The company provides software and computing capacity to businesses seeking alternatives to the higher-cost offerings of major AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The WSJ described Baseten as part of a broader Silicon Valley ecosystem built around AI inference — the process by which AI models apply computing resources to respond to user queries. Tech executives, the outlet reported, have described 2026 as the year inference spending will come to dominate AI industry economics.

Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava was quoted by the WSJ describing open-source AI models as "getting very, very good," a characterization that frames the company's market thesis: as capable open-source models proliferate, demand for the middleware and compute infrastructure to run them at scale — and at lower cost — grows alongside them.